Surely, you have known someone who said they did not want to hear anymore Bible stuff. That is their right. Maybe it’s you. Still, it is your right. But it comes with a price.
We all can choose to reject or believe any information when it is presented to us. But we can also reject Truth by how we live every day. By choosing not to live like Christ, by not doing what we know is right, we reject Christ. However, if we seek to live like Christ and by faith trust ourselves to Him, we live His life. This is a mystery. Yes.
If we abide in Christ, and Christ abides in us, we live by the faith of Jesus and His righteousness through the power of the Holy Ghost. When we yield ourselves to Christ, He builds His own righteousness into our characters. In this way, God is restoring mankind to His image. The Apostle Paul calls this mystery, Christ living in us, the hope of glory.
Daily our character is being built now by yielding to Christ’s righteousness. It is not done all at once in an immediate miraculous transformation at the Second Coming of Christ, as some might believe. For that reason alone, we must know now what loving God is. We must know what sin is. We must know now that our obedience to God, our yielding to God by faith is accounted unto us for righteousness.
Faith without works is dead. Works without faith is dead. They cannot be separated. Know that the just shall live by faith. Know that faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen. God approves those who live by faith as having the faith of Jesus to do His word and His good works. They live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Period.
Do not be deceived. The devil has deceived many into thinking that obedience to God is trying to be saved by works. It is the opposite. Actually, it is those who disobey God that are really workers of iniquity. These work to be saved by their own efforts. But there is no way that living in sin can save. Period.
Instead, those who work in this way, doing their own thing and not the works of righteousness, are those whose names will not be found in the Book of Life. Why? Because they rejected light. Because they loved death, rather than life. Because they did not believe. Because of their unbelief. No matter their lip service, they enter not in, because of their unbelief.